Christian Rössl, Frank Zeilfelder, G. Nürnberger, H. Seidel
We develop a new approach to reconstruct non-discrete models from gridded volume samples. As a model, we use quadratic trivariate super splines on a uniform tetrahedral partition /spl Delta/. The approximating splines are determined in a natural and completely symmetric way by averaging local data samples, such that appropriate smoothness conditions are automatically satisfied. On each tetra-hedron of /spl Delta/ , the quasi-interpolating spline is a polynomial of total degree two which provides several advantages including efficient computation, evaluation and visualization of the model. We apply Bernstein-Bezier techniques well-known in CAGD to compute and evaluate the trivariate spline and its gradient. With this approach the volume data can be visualized efficiently e.g., with isosurface ray-casting. Along an arbitrary ray the splines are univariate, piecewise quadratics and thus the exact intersection for a prescribed isovalue can be easily determined in an analytic and exact way. Our results confirm the efficiency of the quasi-interpolating method and demonstrate high visual quality for rendered isosurfaces.
{"title":"Visualization of volume data with quadratic super splines","authors":"Christian Rössl, Frank Zeilfelder, G. Nürnberger, H. Seidel","doi":"10.1109/VIS.2003.10040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VIS.2003.10040","url":null,"abstract":"We develop a new approach to reconstruct non-discrete models from gridded volume samples. As a model, we use quadratic trivariate super splines on a uniform tetrahedral partition /spl Delta/. The approximating splines are determined in a natural and completely symmetric way by averaging local data samples, such that appropriate smoothness conditions are automatically satisfied. On each tetra-hedron of /spl Delta/ , the quasi-interpolating spline is a polynomial of total degree two which provides several advantages including efficient computation, evaluation and visualization of the model. We apply Bernstein-Bezier techniques well-known in CAGD to compute and evaluate the trivariate spline and its gradient. With this approach the volume data can be visualized efficiently e.g., with isosurface ray-casting. Along an arbitrary ray the splines are univariate, piecewise quadratics and thus the exact intersection for a prescribed isovalue can be easily determined in an analytic and exact way. Our results confirm the efficiency of the quasi-interpolating method and demonstrate high visual quality for rendered isosurfaces.","PeriodicalId":372131,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003.","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123737195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2003-10-22DOI: 10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250374
Guangfeng Ji, Han-Wei Shen, R. Wenger
Tracking and visualizing local features from a time-varying volumetric data allows the user to focus on selected regions of interest, both in space and time, which can lead to a better understanding of the underlying dynamics. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm to track time-varying isosurfaces and interval volumes using isosurfacing in higher dimensions. Instead of extracting the data features such as isosurfaces or interval volumes separately from multiple time steps and computing the spatial correspondence between those features, our algorithm extracts the correspondence directly from the higher dimensional geometry and thus can more efficiently follow the user selected local features in time. In addition, by analyzing the resulting higher dimensional geometry, it becomes easier to detect important topological events and the corresponding critical time steps for the selected features. With our algorithm, the user can interact with the underlying time-varying data more easily. The computation cost for performing time-varying volume tracking is also minimized.
{"title":"Volume tracking using higher dimensional isosurfacing","authors":"Guangfeng Ji, Han-Wei Shen, R. Wenger","doi":"10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250374","url":null,"abstract":"Tracking and visualizing local features from a time-varying volumetric data allows the user to focus on selected regions of interest, both in space and time, which can lead to a better understanding of the underlying dynamics. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm to track time-varying isosurfaces and interval volumes using isosurfacing in higher dimensions. Instead of extracting the data features such as isosurfaces or interval volumes separately from multiple time steps and computing the spatial correspondence between those features, our algorithm extracts the correspondence directly from the higher dimensional geometry and thus can more efficiently follow the user selected local features in time. In addition, by analyzing the resulting higher dimensional geometry, it becomes easier to detect important topological events and the corresponding critical time steps for the selected features. With our algorithm, the user can interact with the underlying time-varying data more easily. The computation cost for performing time-varying volume tracking is also minimized.","PeriodicalId":372131,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003.","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123737697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nowadays, direct volume rendering via 3D textures has positioned itself as an efficient tool for the display and visual analysis of volumetric scalar fields. It is commonly accepted, that for reasonably sized data sets appropriate quality at interactive rates can be achieved by means of this technique. However, despite these benefits one important issue has received little attention throughout the ongoing discussion of texture based volume rendering: the integration of acceleration techniques to reduce per-fragment operations. In this paper, we address the integration of early ray termination and empty-space skipping into texture based volume rendering on graphical processing units (GPU). Therefore, we describe volume ray-casting on programmable graphics hardware as an alternative to object-order approaches. We exploit the early z-test to terminate fragment processing once sufficient opacity has been accumulated, and to skip empty space along the rays of sight. We demonstrate performance gains up to a factor of 3 for typical renditions of volumetric data sets on the ATI 9700 graphics card.
{"title":"Acceleration techniques for GPU-based volume rendering","authors":"J. Krüger, R. Westermann","doi":"10.1109/VIS.2003.10001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VIS.2003.10001","url":null,"abstract":"Nowadays, direct volume rendering via 3D textures has positioned itself as an efficient tool for the display and visual analysis of volumetric scalar fields. It is commonly accepted, that for reasonably sized data sets appropriate quality at interactive rates can be achieved by means of this technique. However, despite these benefits one important issue has received little attention throughout the ongoing discussion of texture based volume rendering: the integration of acceleration techniques to reduce per-fragment operations. In this paper, we address the integration of early ray termination and empty-space skipping into texture based volume rendering on graphical processing units (GPU). Therefore, we describe volume ray-casting on programmable graphics hardware as an alternative to object-order approaches. We exploit the early z-test to terminate fragment processing once sufficient opacity has been accumulated, and to skip empty space along the rays of sight. We demonstrate performance gains up to a factor of 3 for typical renditions of volumetric data sets on the ATI 9700 graphics card.","PeriodicalId":372131,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003.","volume":"98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122589132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2003-10-22DOI: 10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250366
Paolo Cignoni, F. Ganovelli, E. Gobbetti, F. Marton, F. Ponchio, Roberto Scopigno
We describe an efficient technique for out-of-core management and interactive rendering of planet sized textured terrain surfaces. The technique, called planet-sized batched dynamic adaptive meshes (P-BDAM), extends the BDAM approach by using as basic primitive a general triangulation of points on a displaced triangle. The proposed framework introduces several advances with respect to the state of the art: thanks to a batched host-to-graphics communication model, we outperform current adaptive tessellation solutions in terms of rendering speed; we guarantee overall geometric continuity, exploiting programmable graphics hardware to cope with the accuracy issues introduced by single precision floating points; we exploit a compressed out of core representation and speculative prefetching for hiding disk latency during rendering of out-of-core data; we efficiently construct high quality simplified representations with a novel distributed out of core simplification algorithm working on a standard PC network.
{"title":"Planet-sized batched dynamic adaptive meshes (P-BDAM)","authors":"Paolo Cignoni, F. Ganovelli, E. Gobbetti, F. Marton, F. Ponchio, Roberto Scopigno","doi":"10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250366","url":null,"abstract":"We describe an efficient technique for out-of-core management and interactive rendering of planet sized textured terrain surfaces. The technique, called planet-sized batched dynamic adaptive meshes (P-BDAM), extends the BDAM approach by using as basic primitive a general triangulation of points on a displaced triangle. The proposed framework introduces several advances with respect to the state of the art: thanks to a batched host-to-graphics communication model, we outperform current adaptive tessellation solutions in terms of rendering speed; we guarantee overall geometric continuity, exploiting programmable graphics hardware to cope with the accuracy issues introduced by single precision floating points; we exploit a compressed out of core representation and speculative prefetching for hiding disk latency during rendering of out-of-core data; we efficiently construct high quality simplified representations with a novel distributed out of core simplification algorithm working on a standard PC network.","PeriodicalId":372131,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003.","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128650904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2003-10-22DOI: 10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250391
Jinzhu Gao, Jian Huang, Han-Wei Shen, J. Kohl
Visibility culling has the potential to accelerate large data visualization in significant ways. Unfortunately, existing algorithms do not scale well when parallelized, and require full re-computation whenever the opacity transfer function is modified. To address these issues, we have designed a Plenoptic Opacity Function (POF) scheme to encode the view-dependent opacity of a volume block. POFs are computed off-line during a pre-processing stage, only once for each block. We show that using POFs is (i) an efficient, conservative and effective way to encode the opacity variations of a volume block for a range of views, (ii) flexible for re-use by a family of opacity transfer functions without the need for additional off-line processing, and (iii) highly scalable for use in massively parallel implementations. Our results confirm the efficacy of POFs for visibility culling in large-scale parallel volume rendering; we can interactively render the Visible Woman dataset using software ray-casting on 32 processors, with interactive modification of the opacity transfer function on-the-fly.
{"title":"Visibility culling using plenoptic opacity functions for large volume visualization","authors":"Jinzhu Gao, Jian Huang, Han-Wei Shen, J. Kohl","doi":"10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250391","url":null,"abstract":"Visibility culling has the potential to accelerate large data visualization in significant ways. Unfortunately, existing algorithms do not scale well when parallelized, and require full re-computation whenever the opacity transfer function is modified. To address these issues, we have designed a Plenoptic Opacity Function (POF) scheme to encode the view-dependent opacity of a volume block. POFs are computed off-line during a pre-processing stage, only once for each block. We show that using POFs is (i) an efficient, conservative and effective way to encode the opacity variations of a volume block for a range of views, (ii) flexible for re-use by a family of opacity transfer functions without the need for additional off-line processing, and (iii) highly scalable for use in massively parallel implementations. Our results confirm the efficacy of POFs for visibility culling in large-scale parallel volume rendering; we can interactively render the Visible Woman dataset using software ray-casting on 32 processors, with interactive modification of the opacity transfer function on-the-fly.","PeriodicalId":372131,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003.","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127329925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2003-10-22DOI: 10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250359
Hui Xie, Jianning Wang, Jing Hua, Hong Qin, A. Kaufman
This paper addresses the problem of surface reconstruction of highly noisy point clouds. The surfaces to be reconstructed are assumed to be 2-manifolds of piecewise C/sup 1/ continuity, with isolated small irregular regions of high curvature, sophisticated local topology or abrupt burst of noise. At each sample point, a quadric field is locally fitted via a modified moving least squares method. These locally fitted quadric fields are then blended together to produce a pseudo-signed distance field using Shepard's method. We introduce a prioritized front growing scheme in the process of local quadrics fitting. Flatter surface areas tend to grow faster. The already fitted regions will subsequently guide the fitting of those irregular regions in their neighborhood.
{"title":"Piecewise C/sup 1/ continuous surface reconstruction of noisy point clouds via local implicit quadric regression","authors":"Hui Xie, Jianning Wang, Jing Hua, Hong Qin, A. Kaufman","doi":"10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250359","url":null,"abstract":"This paper addresses the problem of surface reconstruction of highly noisy point clouds. The surfaces to be reconstructed are assumed to be 2-manifolds of piecewise C/sup 1/ continuity, with isolated small irregular regions of high curvature, sophisticated local topology or abrupt burst of noise. At each sample point, a quadric field is locally fitted via a modified moving least squares method. These locally fitted quadric fields are then blended together to produce a pseudo-signed distance field using Shepard's method. We introduce a prioritized front growing scheme in the process of local quadrics fitting. Flatter surface areas tend to grow faster. The already fitted regions will subsequently guide the fitting of those irregular regions in their neighborhood.","PeriodicalId":372131,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003.","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125427985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2003-10-22DOI: 10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250405
Huamin Qu, A. Kaufman, R. Shao, Ankush Kumar
We present an innovative modeling and rendering primitive, called the O-buffer, for sample-based graphics, such as images, volumes and points. The 2D or 3D O-buffer is in essence a conventional image or a volume, respectively, except that samples are not restricted to a regular grid. A sample position in the O-buffer is recorded as an offset to the nearest grid point of a regular base grid (hence the name O-buffer). The offset is typically quantized for compact representation and efficient rendering. The O-buffer emancipates pixels and voxels from the regular grids and can greatly improve the modeling power of images and volumes. It is a semi-regular structure which lends itself to efficient construction and rendering. Image quality can be improved by storing more spatial information with samples and by avoiding multiple resamplings and delaying reconstruction to the final rendering stage. Using O-buffers, more accurate multi-resolution representations can be developed for images and volumes. It can also be exploited to represent and render unstructured primitives, such as points, particles, curvilinear or irregular volumes. The O-buffer is therefore a uniform representation for a variety of graphics primitives and supports mixing them in the same scene. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the O-buffer with hierarchical O-buffers, layered depth O-buffers, and hybrid volume rendering with O-buffers.
{"title":"A framework for sample-based rendering with O-buffers","authors":"Huamin Qu, A. Kaufman, R. Shao, Ankush Kumar","doi":"10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250405","url":null,"abstract":"We present an innovative modeling and rendering primitive, called the O-buffer, for sample-based graphics, such as images, volumes and points. The 2D or 3D O-buffer is in essence a conventional image or a volume, respectively, except that samples are not restricted to a regular grid. A sample position in the O-buffer is recorded as an offset to the nearest grid point of a regular base grid (hence the name O-buffer). The offset is typically quantized for compact representation and efficient rendering. The O-buffer emancipates pixels and voxels from the regular grids and can greatly improve the modeling power of images and volumes. It is a semi-regular structure which lends itself to efficient construction and rendering. Image quality can be improved by storing more spatial information with samples and by avoiding multiple resamplings and delaying reconstruction to the final rendering stage. Using O-buffers, more accurate multi-resolution representations can be developed for images and volumes. It can also be exploited to represent and render unstructured primitives, such as points, particles, curvilinear or irregular volumes. The O-buffer is therefore a uniform representation for a variety of graphics primitives and supports mixing them in the same scene. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the O-buffer with hierarchical O-buffers, layered depth O-buffers, and hybrid volume rendering with O-buffers.","PeriodicalId":372131,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003.","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114914577","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2003-10-22DOI: 10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250400
Michael J. McGuffin, Liviu Tancau, Ravin Balakrishnan
Many traditional techniques for "looking inside" volumetric data involve removing portions of the data, for example using various cutting tools, to reveal the interior. This allows the user to see hidden parts of the data, but has the disadvantage of removing potentially important surrounding contextual information. We explore an alternate strategy for browsing that uses deformations, where the user can cut into and open up, spread apart, or peel away parts of the volume in real time, making the interior visible while still retaining surrounding context. We consider various deformation strategies and present a number of interaction techniques based on different metaphors. Our designs pay special attention to the semantic layers that might compose a volume (e.g. the skin, muscle, bone in a scan of a human). Users can apply deformations to only selected layers, or apply a given deformation to a different degree to each layer, making browsing more flexible and facilitating the visualization of relationships between layers. Our interaction techniques are controlled with direct, "in place" manipulation, using pop-up menus and 3D widgets, to avoid the divided attention and awkwardness that would come with panels of traditional widgets. Initial user feedback indicates that our techniques are valuable, especially for showing portions of the data spatially situated in context with surrounding data.
{"title":"Using deformations for browsing volumetric data","authors":"Michael J. McGuffin, Liviu Tancau, Ravin Balakrishnan","doi":"10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250400","url":null,"abstract":"Many traditional techniques for \"looking inside\" volumetric data involve removing portions of the data, for example using various cutting tools, to reveal the interior. This allows the user to see hidden parts of the data, but has the disadvantage of removing potentially important surrounding contextual information. We explore an alternate strategy for browsing that uses deformations, where the user can cut into and open up, spread apart, or peel away parts of the volume in real time, making the interior visible while still retaining surrounding context. We consider various deformation strategies and present a number of interaction techniques based on different metaphors. Our designs pay special attention to the semantic layers that might compose a volume (e.g. the skin, muscle, bone in a scan of a human). Users can apply deformations to only selected layers, or apply a given deformation to a different degree to each layer, making browsing more flexible and facilitating the visualization of relationships between layers. Our interaction techniques are controlled with direct, \"in place\" manipulation, using pop-up menus and 3D widgets, to avoid the divided attention and awkwardness that would come with panels of traditional widgets. Initial user feedback indicates that our techniques are valuable, especially for showing portions of the data spatially situated in context with surrounding data.","PeriodicalId":372131,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003.","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117225787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2003-10-22DOI: 10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250388
Wei Li, K. Mueller, A. Kaufman
We propose methods to accelerate texture-based volume rendering by skipping invisible voxels. We partition the volume into sub-volumes, each containing voxels with similar properties. Sub-volumes composed of only voxels mapped to empty by the transfer function are skipped. To render the adaptively partitioned sub-volumes in visibility order, we reorganize them into an orthogonal BSP tree. We also present an algorithm that computes incrementally the intersection of the volume with the slicing planes, which avoids the overhead of the intersection and texture coordinates computation introduced by the partitioning. Rendering with empty space skipping is 2 to 5 times faster than without it. To skip occluded voxels, we introduce the concept of orthogonal opacity map, that simplifies the transformation between the volume coordinates and the opacity map coordinates, which is intensively used for occlusion detection. The map is updated efficiently by the GPU. The sub-volumes are then culled and clipped against the opacity map. We also present a method that adaptively adjusts the optimal number of the opacity map updates. With occlusion clipping, about 60% of non-empty voxels can be skipped and an additional 80% speedup on average is gained for iso-surface-like rendering.
{"title":"Empty space skipping and occlusion clipping for texture-based volume rendering","authors":"Wei Li, K. Mueller, A. Kaufman","doi":"10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250388","url":null,"abstract":"We propose methods to accelerate texture-based volume rendering by skipping invisible voxels. We partition the volume into sub-volumes, each containing voxels with similar properties. Sub-volumes composed of only voxels mapped to empty by the transfer function are skipped. To render the adaptively partitioned sub-volumes in visibility order, we reorganize them into an orthogonal BSP tree. We also present an algorithm that computes incrementally the intersection of the volume with the slicing planes, which avoids the overhead of the intersection and texture coordinates computation introduced by the partitioning. Rendering with empty space skipping is 2 to 5 times faster than without it. To skip occluded voxels, we introduce the concept of orthogonal opacity map, that simplifies the transformation between the volume coordinates and the opacity map coordinates, which is intensively used for occlusion detection. The map is updated efficiently by the GPU. The sub-volumes are then culled and clipped against the opacity map. We also present a method that adaptively adjusts the optimal number of the opacity map updates. With occlusion clipping, about 60% of non-empty voxels can be skipped and an additional 80% speedup on average is gained for iso-surface-like rendering.","PeriodicalId":372131,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003.","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132212387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2003-10-22DOI: 10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250404
M. Hopf, T. Ertl
Numerical particle simulations and astronomical observations create huge data sets containing uncorrelated 3D points of varying size. These data sets cannot be visualized interactively by simply rendering millions of colored points for each frame. Therefore, in many visualization applications a scalar density corresponding to the point distribution is resampled on a regular grid for direct volume rendering. However, many fine details are usually lost for voxel resolutions which still allow interactive visualization on standard workstations. Since no surface geometry is associated with our data sets, the recently introduced point-based rendering algorithms cannot be applied as well. In this paper we propose to accelerate the visualization of scattered point data by a hierarchical data structure based on a PCA clustering procedure. By traversing this structure for each frame we can trade-off rendering speed vs. image quality. Our scheme also reduces memory consumption by using quantized relative coordinates and it allows for fast sorting of semi-transparent clusters. We analyze various software and hardware implementations of our renderer and demonstrate that we can now visualize data sets with tens of millions of points interactively with sub-pixel screen space error on current PC graphics hardware employing advanced vertex shader functionality.
{"title":"Herarchical splatting of scattered data","authors":"M. Hopf, T. Ertl","doi":"10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VISUAL.2003.1250404","url":null,"abstract":"Numerical particle simulations and astronomical observations create huge data sets containing uncorrelated 3D points of varying size. These data sets cannot be visualized interactively by simply rendering millions of colored points for each frame. Therefore, in many visualization applications a scalar density corresponding to the point distribution is resampled on a regular grid for direct volume rendering. However, many fine details are usually lost for voxel resolutions which still allow interactive visualization on standard workstations. Since no surface geometry is associated with our data sets, the recently introduced point-based rendering algorithms cannot be applied as well. In this paper we propose to accelerate the visualization of scattered point data by a hierarchical data structure based on a PCA clustering procedure. By traversing this structure for each frame we can trade-off rendering speed vs. image quality. Our scheme also reduces memory consumption by using quantized relative coordinates and it allows for fast sorting of semi-transparent clusters. We analyze various software and hardware implementations of our renderer and demonstrate that we can now visualize data sets with tens of millions of points interactively with sub-pixel screen space error on current PC graphics hardware employing advanced vertex shader functionality.","PeriodicalId":372131,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003.","volume":"157 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123273354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}